10/Nov/2009
Bringing Electricity to Central
Was a Big Challenge in the '30s
Believe it or not, today’s perplexing health care crisis is
neither the first nor the only serious social problem our country has come up
against in its 233-year history.
There once was a time when people living in cities had
electricity but in the 1930’s and early 1940’s electric lines rarely extended
beyond city limits.
This meant the country
folks had to do without electricity long after people living in cities enjoyed the
better quality of life electrification provides.
“Anybody who spent a week or two without electricity
following Hurricane Gustav last year knows what we were up against,” said A.C.
Thomas, 82, who has lived on
Wax
Road next to DEMCO’s headquarters building since
1950.
Investor Owned
The problem was that, as their name implies, “investor-owned”
electric utility companies were in business to make a profit.
But there was no profit in installing poles
and running an electric line down an unpaved road for ten miles just to serve
three or four houses.
The battle in the
U.S. Congress over passage of rural electrification was intense.
But in 1936 one of the most important pieces of
New Deal legislation made organizations such as Dixie Electric Membership
Cooperative or DEMCO possible.
“That gave us the break we needed,” said Thomas.
“Until then you went to bed when it got dark
and got up when it was light.”
DEMCO publication from February, 1957
announcing the death
of President Wes Long.
Parallels between then and now come into focus when you learn that President Roosevelt actually set the stage for the act’s passage in May of 1935 by issuing an executive order. He created the Rural Electrification Administration or REA. It was part of a relief package designed to stimulate our nation's economy that was stuck in the Great Depression. It made low interest government loans available to organized groups of citizens who lived in rural areas.
Only ten percent of Americans living outside the city limits
in 1935 had electricity.
By 1950 more
than 90 percent of our nation’s farms were electrified.
Wes Long
An early leader of the effort to bring electricity to the
northern two thirds of East Baton Rouge Parish was Henry W. “Wes” Long.
“My grandfather was one of the leaders of the effort to
create DEMCO,” explained Donna Long who lived on
Tucker Road when she was growing up.
“My mom and dad ran one of many large dairy
operations in this area and none of that would have been possible without
electricity.”
The REA changed the lives of people throughout the northern
two thirds of East Baton Rouge Parish and throughout
America .
The government granted the electric
cooperatives loans at very low rates.
Despite charges of communism by the very utility companies that supplied
many of the cooperatives with the electricity they distributed, DEMCO and
thousands of similar cooperatives came into being and supplied the farms with
power.
Milking by Hand
“You have to understand what happened whenever we were out
of electricity on our dairy farm in the 1950’s,” explained Long.
“Our 150 cows had to be milked at 3 a.m. and
at 3 p.m. every day no matter what or they would go dry.
When we had no electricity we had to milk by
hand and people would have to come from everywhere to help us.”
Sam Womack and grandson
Justin Womack
Long said they would move from farm to farm milking constantly. When milking a large herd by hand as soon as one milking is finished it is time to start all over again.
“Of course my job as a teenager was to carry buckets full of
fresh milk to the big vat, climb the ladder and dump it in.
Then I would bring buckets filled with feed
back to the milking pits,” she said.
“But
none of that milk could be sold because we had no way to cool it, so it all had
to be thrown away.”
Sam Womack, 82, who has lived on
Tucker Road since 1956 said he bought an
electric generator back then that ran off a 100-horsepower Ford tractor.
“It could keep our dairy operation going when
a storm came, but that thing just sucked up diesel,” he said.
“There was certainly no profit in it.”
Dependable Power
Supply
Long and Womack agree that since DEMCO was created by rural
people it was designed to serve the northern two thirds of East Baton Rouge
Parish with a highly dependable power supply.
“They understood the trouble we were in when we were out of
power, so they tried doubly hard not to make us wait too long,” said Long.
“They really were very reliable even back in
those early years.”
Donna Long, granddaughter of Wes Long, grew up on her parents' dairy farm on Tucker Road.A DEMCO publication from February, 1957, tells of the death of Long’s grandfather who was serving as the organization’s President at the time of his death. Wes Long was elected to the DEMCO Board in 1940 and became President in 1948. Before that he represented both Central and Zachary for ten years on the East Baton Rouge Police Jury which was abolished by the formation of a City-Parish Council in 1948.
Coal Oil Lamps
Ninety-five-year-old C.C. Black who has lived his entire
life on
Black Road
“We had coal oil lamps and that was all there
was when I was in school,” he said.
“I
was a grown man before we got electricity.”
said when he was growing up nobody even thought about electricity.
While he played no role in the early days of DEMCO, Black
recalls that electricity was distributed to everyone by the REA and DEMCO.
“It did not matter if you were rich or poor,
black or white or what you were back then you got electricity.
They ran their lines everywhere.”
DEMCO members meet in early 1950s.Today life without electricity is almost unthinkable, but it is good to remember that it was not always that way. Bringing electricity out beyond the city limits in the 1930’s brought Central and Zachary out of the “dark ages” and into the light of a very bright future.
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